Review & Interview: Michael Goldfarb, "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance"

Michael Goldfarb, "Emancipation: How Liberating
Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance", Simon
and Schuster, 408 pages, $30.00.

Michael Goldfarb is an American-born, London-based
contributor to NPR (as well as to THE BBC and The Guardian), who was inspired to
endure "the agony of writing" his engaging book for seemingly
disjointed reasons. One was Talmudic. The Talmud, he tells us, enjoins Jews to
perform 613 mitzvoth or commandments.
Goldfarb, though far from an observant Jew, nevertheless adduced and felt called
upon to fulfill yet a 614th mitzvah, one
that enjoined him, along with other "Jews born after the Holocaust . . .
to reclaim and retell one part of the history of our people."

The slice of history Goldfarb sets out to reclaim is that of
Jews who entered into the mainstream of European society when, in the late
eighteenth-century, the Enlightenment began to pry open up legal, cultural and
physical ghettoes. At their first brush with the broader world, the outsider
status of newly emancipated Jews permitted them to see both the failings in and
the opportunities presented by the status quo more clearly than many of their
contemporaries. They were equipped to be critics, artists, and businessman --
catalysts for change, in other
words, which, in turn, often made them suspect in the eyes of the
population at large and put them at risk. Their emancipation was, in any case,
tenuous and reversible. One hears Ghetto doors literally opening and closing
throughout Goldfarb's chronicle. One of his chief points is that over time Jews
were able to claim and fight for rights in their own voices and on their on own
behalf, rather than solely by petitioning mercurial protectors.

The book begins in 1785, shortly before the French
Revolution, when a question proposed for general discussion among the French
literati was: "Is there a way to make a better wine press?" The
question about wine press was accompanied by a social question: "Are there
means to render the Jews more useful and happy in France?"

Goldfarb takes the debate about whether Jews could -- or
should -- be rendered more useful and happy through the French Revolution, where
it inspired endless hours of debate in the National Assembly, and to the rise
of Napoleon. Napoleon suppressed debate but decided in favor of general
emancipation. When his forces conquered Italy, denizens of its ancestral
ghettos were astounded to find that there were Jews in the liberating army, who
relieved them of the Jewish stars they had been compelled to wear since the
Middle Ages.

Goldfarb comes to his story from a very different angle. As
a journalist who: "After the attacks of September 11, 2001 found himself
reporting on radical Islam," he wondered about parallels between
nineteenth century Jewish and twenty-first century Muslim experience of Europe.
Jews, like Muslims today, were once by and large considered inassimilable.
Moreover, there was a religious element among them who vociferously opposed contagion
by exposure to European culture.

Goldfarb notes that "In 1811, as Napoleon marched east
through the Ashkenazi heartland into Russia, Rabbi Shneur Zalman, founder of
Lubavitcher Hasidism, found his sleep troubled." Should he support
Napoleon, who would make Jewish life easier, or lend his weight to the Tsar,
historic oppressor of the Jews? Rabbi Zalman opted for the Tsar. "Even
though poverty will increase," he reasoned, "the hearts of Israel
will be bound, fastened and tied to their Father in Heaven." Goldfarb
notes drily that: "Very few Jews in Russia helped the French."

Goldfarb's account uses Spinoza as a touchstone (documenting
his influence on John Locke, for example), hones in on Moses Mendelssohn,
praised as an exemplary Enlightenment philosopher by Immanuel Kant, and spends
a fair amount of time on Karl Marx and his peers, many of whom were contending,
whether as converts or not, with their weight of Jewish heritage. Goldfarb's
reprise of Marx is notable for making less of the gentile Fredrich Engels and
more of Jews like Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine. It was Hess, for example, who,
in 1847, first coined the expression, "A specter is
hunting Europe -- the specter of Communism", with which Marx, a year
later, began the Communist Manifesto.

Goldfarb seamlessly weaves elements of his family's story
into the narrative. He tells the tale of Mordechai Katz, for example, his
great-grandfather, who left Odessa in 1884, became Goldenfarb, a more Germanic
name, when in Hamburg, and had the name shortened and finalized as Goldfarb by
an immigration clerk in the United States.

"Emancipation", though an honorable effort to
fulfill the author’s 614th commandment is not, and does not claim to be,
definitive. There are grounds for questioning some of Goldfarb's omissions and
conclusions, as I had an opportunity to do during an email exchange with the
author.

HB: You write:
"A young Orthodox Jewish woman from Galicia arrives in New York, drops out
of school at fourteen, and goes to work in a sweatshop. Her son becomes a
doctor. His son becomes a writer. Along the way, religious observance
diminished in importance, the identity of Jew does not. That happens to be my
family's story, but in its broad outlines it is like millions of others."

But what space is left for secular Jews at this point?
Hasn't secular Jewish culture shrunk?

MG: I don't think
the space for secular Jews has grown smaller. I think that the practice of
religion has grown more adaptable. If younger self-identified Jews in the U.S.
are joining temples again that has as much to do with the increased religiosity
of America as it does with squeezing out the secular Jewish identity.

I am an atheist, I am also a Jew. How could I not be? No one
can take away that part of my identity formed at Seders at my grandmother's
house, the overheard conversations (in the 1950's) about Israel and the
Holocaust, and the whispers about whether this person or that person was Jewish.
Nor can anyone take from me the questioning wit that is the hallmark of Jewish
thinking.

HB: You write, re
Moses Mendelssohn that: "The very idea that a Jew . . . could write with
such eloquence was considered astonishing in and of itself." Was it really
the case prior to the Enlightenment that Jew were considered unfit for
literature? How radically at odds with current typology!

MG: Jews were
considered “clever." But before Spinoza they didn't engage with the great
intellectual questions of the day. Spinoza wrote in Latin. But Mendelssohn
wrote in German -- his third language -- and no Jew had ever published such
important work in that language up to that point in time. That's what made it
seem astonishing.

HB: Bernard
Lazare is remembered for his fierce condemnation of French Jewry's timidity and
passivity during the Dreyfus Affair. Where would someone like Lazare be in the
Jewish world today?

MG: Probably
living in Israel. Writing for Ha'aretz. Feuding with everybody.

HB: The poet
Heinrich Heine complains: "I try to tell my grief and it all becomes
comic." You comment: "No one has ever distilled the essence of modern
Jewish writing so clearly". But what's so funny about Jewish grief?

MG: What
underlies mordant Jewish wit is profound anger and confusion: think of Philip
Roth (who, by the way, regards Heine very highly). The irony of the
interrogative in shaping Jewish jokes derives from Talmud study but its
withering sarcasm is motivated by grief. "Thank you for making us the
Chosen People, but couldn't you have chosen someone else."

HB: Though you
deal with Marx at some length, you barely touch on his alleged anti- Semitism.
Do you feel it has been overblown?

MG: No, there's
no getting around the self-hatred inside of Marx. But then he was full of
hatred about every aspect of his origins. He hated the bourgeois class from
which he came just as much. His views were always overstated. One of the
reasons his work found an audience was his skill with invective. Over-reaching
is the hallmark of all his writing, as anyone who has struggled through "Das
Kapital" can attest.

HB: You make a
parallel between the Jewish experience of Europe in the nineteenth-century and
the Muslim experience of it today. How so?

MG: Picture the
typical Ashkenazi Jew coming out of the ghetto: he wears traditional dress, takes
a different Sabbath, is barely fluent in the local language. He goes to his
rabbinical courts for redress on every legal question. He doesn’t trust his new
environment but has to earn a living within the confines of it. The society is
demanding that overnight he stop with the silly clothes and strange Sabbath and
go to the same court as everyone else, and to hasten the process is passing
legislation forbidding his traditional way of life. How do you think his
children feel?

Now, picture a Muslim immigrant from a small village in
Pakistan, Bangla Desh or Turkey. He wears traditional dress, takes a different
Sabbath, is barely fluent in the local language. He trusts his Shari court more
than the local justice system. In fact, he trusts very little about his new
environment but this is where he has to make a living. The society is demanding
that overnight he stop with the silly clothes and strange Sabbath and go to the
same court as every one else, and to hasten the process is passing legislation
forbidding his traditional way of life. How do you think his children feel?

Those are the similarities. The critical difference is that
Islam today is going through a civil war between those who want to be modern
and the radicals who want to take the religious community back to their
interpretation of the "pure" Islam. Some frustrated younger people
are turning to the radicals.

HB: You ask:
"What was the price paid by the Jewish community and European society for
the process of integrating?" The second part of that question is
disturbing. What price did Europe pay for having Jews?

MG: Hmm, you
catch out a phrase that is rhetorically interesting but on reflection may be no
more than that. Let me go Rabbinical on you and answer a question with a
question. "What has been the price paid by the African-American community
and the wider American society for the process of integration?" The
changes in the society brought about by admitting Jews into it as citizens were
similar. Not every individual in Europe in the 19th century had his or her life
changed by this different Jewish presence. But the society was completely
changed by it: through the work of Jewish intellectuals, financiers and simply
by the fact that an old sense of Christian superiority had been challenged.

HB: You live in
England, for the most part. I’ve never thought of England having much in the
way of robust secular Jewish expression. Wouldn't Manhattan suit you better?

MG: There are
fewer Jews in Britain than you can find in Zabar's in Manhattan on an average
weekend morning. But the Jewish question was not what motivated my move here.
I'm a descendant of Jews who left their homelands for a New Land in order to
have a better life. I moved to London from New York for the same reason. I was
a total failure in the town of my birth. Within five years of moving to London
I was writing for The Guardian, making programs for the BBC and had become
NPR's London correspondent. So I'm living the immigrant dream in reverse.

HB: You describe
Jews as having had their "mullahs", so to speak, rabbis who detested
the likes of Mendelssohn, for instance. Don't we still have them, on the
religious right in Israel for example.

MG: I think the
power you refer to is very mutable and reflects the times in which we live. Fundamentalism
is eating away at all the Abrahamic faiths at the moment. This era will pass, I
hope.